The Benefits of Adding the Power Clean into Your Workout

My Dad was the head football coach at Pike County in Georgia in the late 70’s and early 80’s. During those days, the Head Coach took on all the responsibilities of the team. Cutting grass, rounding up equipment, raising money, getting players to practice, and running the weight room.

He didn’t know a lot about lifting weights but he was smart enough to latch on to a system that had some success. He used Bigger, Faster, Stronger with his athletes and taught me from an early age that the power clean was the most important lift for football. I can remember his exact words: “If you could only do one lift, it would have to be the power clean.”

"The Only Thing I Cared About Was The Power Clean"

Now my Dad was and still is the smartest person I have ever met, so I took his words to heart; about the only thing I cared about in high school was the squat and power clean. I was the exact opposite of almost every high school student in America. Add in the fact that I have the body type that is conducive to a good power clean, I quickly found out that I was pretty good at it as well.

Around this time, I also read an article by Alan Headrick from the Air Force Academy. He said that the #1 predictor of the starters on the Offensive Line was the power clean - since I was an Offensive Lineman that was all I needed to hear. After my senior year of high school football I was able to power clean 305x4 with pretty good technique. I also had a 30 inch vertical jump at 250 lbs. This made me even more of a believer of the BFS concept of transfer.

Westside Methods

Then as I grew older, I started reading more about the Westside Methods and Louie Simmons. Westside seems anti-Olympic lifts (even if they are not, it comes off that way) and I fell right in line with their thinking. They believed that any lift could be explosive, not just the Olympic lifts and they do have a point.

Many times weightlifting coaches will talk about the 2nd pull and how explosive it is and will compare it to a max or near max effort squat. This is not a fair assessment. It would be more rightly compared to a dynamic effort box squat, deadlift, or bench press; that is comparing apples to apples. No one is going to argue that a snatch generates more force than a slow max effort squat, but comparing the snatch to the dynamic box squat gets much closer.